Abstract

We investigate experimentally the dependence of the Goos-Hanchen shift on the surface properties of an air-metal interface. The shift depends on the microscopic roughness of the metal surface but it is insensitive to the large-scale variations associated with surface non-flatness. Both an effective medium model of roughness and the Rayleigh-Rice theory of scattering are used to interpret the observed phenomenon. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America